Senior Thesis Division, Friends of the Libraries Award

This research seeks to examine the unique position of Japanese biracial celebrities as both objects veneration and distancing in contemporary Japanese society. Understanding how biracial celebrities, and biracial individuals as a whole, are viewed as either Japanese or non-Japanese can provide a sense for the potential for future immigration into Japanese society. These issues of openness to immigration, and integration of immigrants, are particularly critical given Japan’s declining birth rate and rapidly aging population. These two trends will result in an inability to support this elderly population without massive immigration flows in the very near future. My research addresses the possibility for such large-scale immigration to occur, through the lens of the simultaneous veneration and marginalization of biracial celebrities.

Christine Lindell (International Studies) Professor Daniel ChirotThe Young and the Restless: Serbian Youth, EU Visas and the Consequences of Conditionality

In this thesis, I investigate the historical roots of why for Serbians the freedom to travel has come to serve as a symbol of personal success, an indicator of political normalcy and a source of national pride and exceptionalism. Serbia’s decade of isolation under Milošević added new layers of painful meaning to the notion of travel – and the protests which overthrew him in 2000 were in some ways a triumph of internationalism. Given this historical background, I then analyze the current political factors which prevent Serbians from traveling. Focusing in particular on the relationship between Serbia and the EU, I investigate the origins of the EU’s strict visa regime towards Serbia in the wars of the 1990s, and explore how, due to the creation and expansion of the Schengen passport-free zone, this restrictive visa regime came to long outlive its original purpose – transforming from a means of controlling the wave of Yugoslav refugees which entered Europe during the nineties into both the basis of a buffer zone at the periphery of the EU and a tool of conditionality in the EU-Serbia bilateral relationship. Finally, I use original research to demonstrate that the EU’s continued closed-door policy, as it limits what Serbians perceive as a basic right and source of pride, has produced strong feelings of unfairness and resentment towards the EU among young people and students, with serious consequences for the future of Serbia-EU relations.

Cameron Robert Rule (Slavic Languages and Literatures) Dr. Katarzyna DziwirekMorphological Integration of Foreign Elements in Russian: A Comparison of Bilingual Speakers in Lithuania and Estonia

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, isolated Russian communities in the Baltic States transitioned from monolingualism to bilingualism. Prolonged language contact resulted in the restructuring of the Russian language, providing multiple opportunities to examine language change in a dynamic and evolving environment. My research analyzes disparities in the morphological integration of Estonian and Lithuanian morphemes used by Russian speakers by examining the phonetic/phonological structures of the contact languages. I argue that the crucial factor determining integration are linguistic similarities shared between a speaker’s L1 (Russian) and L2 (Lithuanian or Estonian). Data was retrieved from online forums, blogs, as well as radio and television broadcasts. In depth analysis revealed several patterns in the integration of Lithuanian and Estonian morphemes by Russian speakers. There is a consistent trend of non-integration for Estonian words ending in vowels or that are morphologically complex. Conversely, Lithuanian words and morphemes demonstrate little restriction in integration.

Senior Non-Thesis Division, Kenneth S. Allen Award

Luke Caldwell (Comparative History of Ideas) Dr. Maria Elena GarciaThe Changing Winds of Civilization: The Aboriginal and Sovereignty Between the Desert and the State

The antagonistic relationship between the Australian state and the Aborigines has deep and problematic roots. Beginning with the racist doctrine of terra nullius, I look at how over two hundred years of legal policies have consistently constructed the Aborigine as a problem that required a state solution. I argue that these policies are predicated on a complete denial of native sovereignty and have increasingly alienated native communities. By refusing to engage with the source of these problems, the state has created significant barriers to native rehabilitation and has hijacked reconciliation efforts to strengthen its hegemony instead of native groups. Rather than solving the “Aboriginal problem”, these state policies have created it by placing Aborigines in an ambiguous political space that functions as a medium for civilizing the native—a process through which the native is killed and reborn in a form that is unproblematic for the state.

Despite the wealth of research conducted on the Italian Renaissance, the field of woman writers has been largely overlooked under the assumption that women in the Renaissance simply produced very little written work, and even then very little written work of any interest to modern scholars. Only in the last ten to twenty years have a limited number of scholars begun to explore the topic, finding quickly that women did in fact produce a large quantity of work on a variety of topics that offer great insight into the intellectual and social culture of the Italian Renaissance. This study examines a little-known collection of female biographies from 1497 by a male author, one of the earliest examples of this type of work in the Renaissance and extremely unique in its inclusion of a woodcut portrait of each of the 186 women it discusses. An analysis of this author’s perspective on one female humanist writer, Isotta Nogarola, is made possible through the transcription and translation of the book’s original Latin text, of which no previous transcriptions or translations currently exist. This analysis demonstrates the legitimacy of these women in their own time through their acknowledgement by their male counterparts, and the importance of their writings as evidenced by this authors use of female biographies for his own intellectual gain. The unprecedented number of biographies included in this work, many with a perspective unique to its author (as demonstrated in this analysis of Isotta Nogarola’s biography), also serve to validate the existence of note-worthy, female-produced writings in the Italian Renaissance. This project marks the beginning of an exploration of a previously overlooked and greatly important Renaissance text that will contribute to future research in the field of Italian woman writers.

Scarlett Mai (Comparative History of Ideas)Dr. Maria Elena GarciaMediating the Tension Between Individual and Cultural Rights

Does human rights law replicate colonial law in its displacement and denigration of different cultural conceptions of justice? This essay argues that, although some transnational actors replicate colonial discourse when they prematurely criticize culture, indigenous women are not passively yielding to outside impositions of human rights. Rather, they are appropriating human rights and adopting tactics that resist, rather than reinscribe, national and transnational power structures. In defending traditional forms of village-based reconciliation against the criticism of the CEDAW Committee, Fijian women are reconceptualizing what it means to bring justice to victims of gender violence. Village-based reconciliation is an attractive addition to formal legal proceedings because it is flexible enough to incorporate counseling and compensation for victims. Fijian women navigate the tension between women’s rights and cultural rights by renegotiate gender relationships within their culture while affirming their right to define and shape village-based reconciliation.